[Dixielandjazz] Wynton and Eric Play The Blues

[Stephen G Barbone]

Pairing Their Sounds and Sharing the Blues

NY Times- April 11, 2011  - By JON PARELES

Eric Clapton chose the songs and Wynton Marsalis laid out the musical  
territory for “Wynton Marsalis and Eric Clapton Play the Blues,” the  
Jazz at Lincoln Center concert at Rose Theater on Friday night, the  
first of two shows. It was a concert so fixated on elegant details  
that its blues were bloodless.

Mr. Clapton selected songs recorded long ago by Louis Armstrong,  
Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith. Mr. Marsalis’s  
designated musical turf was, with a few time warps, the vintage New  
Orleans sound of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, complete with tandem- 
trumpet theme statements (from Mr. Marsalis and Marcus Printup),  
briskly strummed banjo (from the New Orleans stalwart Don Vappie),  
growling trombone (from Chris Crenshaw) and scampering clarinet (from  
Victor Goines).

Mr. Clapton’s electric-guitar solos were the historical wild card,  
nudging the music from 1920s New Orleans toward 1950s Chicago and  
Memphis. “For me to be able to come in here and try and make my little  
jingly stuff work inside this,” a smiling Mr. Clapton said onstage,  
gesturing toward Mr. Marsalis’s band, “it’s a challenge.”

He was all too humble and accommodating compared with, for instance,  
Willie Nelson singing the blues with Jazz at Lincoln Center. Mr.  
Clapton’s vocals were tucked into the sound of the band; his guitar  
solos took their turn after the band’s players.

The arrangements, by Mr. Marsalis, were impeccable in their way:  
struts, two-beats and shuffles, full of traditional-jazz polyphony and  
intricately written horn-section riffs, like train-whistle trumpets  
near the end of “Joliet Bound.” When Mr. Clapton performed his own  
“Layla” — at the urging, he insisted, of the band’s bassist, Carlos  
Henriquez — it was recast as an old-fashioned slow drag.

Band members’ solos generally stayed within the New Orleans idiom,  
though Mr. Marsalis and Dan Nimmer on piano toyed with later eras. Ali  
Jackson’s drumming was a slyly knowing period piece; the finesse of  
his snare-drum rolls, accelerating then tapering down to a few poised  
taps, was one of the band’s delights.

And when Mr. Clapton’s moments came, there were his guitar solos. He  
skidded into “Ice Cream” with rockabilly aggression, glided into  
“Careless Love” with smoothly airborne country phrasing, moaned and  
flailed in “Layla” and got a blues-club bite in Big Maceo’s “Kidman  
Blues.”

The program didn’t imply a strict structural definition of the blues;  
some songs had 12 bars and verses in AAB form, some didn’t. Nor did  
the concert seek an emotional frame for the music or an impact beyond  
the skill and joviality of the collaboration. For Howlin’ Wolf’s  
“Forty Four,” the beat had the right sidelong stomp, and the guitar  
solo had some claws, but there was none of the weary, ornery menace  
staked out by the lyrics. “Careless Love” was more nonchalant than  
heartbroken; “Joe Turner’s Blues” barely hinted at elegy.

Taj Mahal, who opened the concert with a solo set, returned to sing  
the New Orleans funeral standard “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,”  
instilling it with grainy gospel conviction. But for most of the  
concert the blues was presented as something scholarly and neatly  
accomplished: an exercise, not an exorcism.